Why The Terrorists Were Men

In the days following the Boston Marathon bombings, an interesting and revealing thing started to happen in the media. With the bombers’ identities unknown, and the manhunt in progress, the terrible event started to a form a blank screen onto which every political faction in America projected their own internal devils. On the conventional right, of course, it was Islam; on the Alex Jones right, it was the government; and at Salon, David Sirota now famously hoped it was a white guy.

It was interesting to watch our conversation about the bombings become a conversation about our conversation. On message boards, social media and in the comments sections of news articles, people talked endlessly about how they feared their political opponents would interpret the event, about who would claim this as some sort of twisted victory for their worldview. In an interesting move, Salon quickly posted a compilation of the “Worst Reactions to the Boston Manhunt,” in which commentators seeking to associate various large human factions (Muslims, Democrats, even “millennials”) with the bombings were taken to task for their cynicism and their bigotry.

Then on Thursday, Salon published an article by Irin Carmon entitled “Why Are Terrorists So Often Men?” This was a little jarring, in light of everything. Didn’t we have an agreement here? Weren’t we supposed to be vigilant, and restrict ourselves from associating vast human collectives with the horrible acts that happened in Boston?

There are all sorts of groups that have the misfortune of seeing themselves over-represented in catalogs of various anti-social behaviors. From the right, of course, it is the religious affiliation of the Tsarnaev brothers that is being singled out as the determining factor behind their actions. But Salon is not a right-wing publication, and it has been (quite laudably) vocal about why the Marathon bombings should not be associated with the Muslim faith. But politics, at heart, is really just a system of biases, and for a great many culture-war-type reasons, this publication was not aligned in a manner that would have allowed it to see Harmon’s article as an example of the same sort of guilt-by-association. And so it was published.

What did it say?

For such a piece with such an inflammatory title, the article was not really that substantial. There were some stats from Mother Jones about how 61 out of 62 recent mass-murderers were men, a digression about how Tamerlan Tsarnaev beat his ex-girlfriend and a lengthy quote from sociologist Abby Ferber, “who has studied white supremacist groups and masculinity.”

(Really? I wonder what her particular views on this quality that defines half of the world’s population are, then?)

According to Ferber, the culture is changing in such a fashion as to marginalize the things that were once associated with masculinity. This, in turn, is creating a sort of pressure-valve situation, in which “masculinity” is likely to erupt in extreme fashions. According to Carmon, it was this combination of factors that likely lead the Tsarnaev brothers to “participate in the hyper-masculine act of terror.”

Is this an accurate construction?

Here at AskMen, we are no strangers to the idea that cultures and circumstances change, and that these changes can sometimes undermine what men once understood to be their role. That’s why so many of our articles take the form of advice: guys want to know how they should act.